Scheduling a meeting for multiple parties requires considerable manual effort on the part of the meeting organizer. For instance, the organizer must find a time and place that satisfies all constraints; or at least minimally violates the constraints. Existing calendar applications provide some assistance, however they require the organizer to combine the organizer's knowledge of an invitee's context and preferences with the binary availability information stored in the calendar. With existing systems, meeting organizers need to invest time, and may result in a reschedule, further inconveniencing the organizer and the invitees.
Consider as an example a user who would like to have periodic (e.g., fortnightly) 1-on-1 meetings with a team of 12 people. This user may also desire to have periodic meetings with the whole group. Setting a fixed time (e.g., 10 am every second Monday) for each of these meetings is a common practice, but it will introduce constraints for both the user and the team. In practice, many of these meetings may end up being rescheduled as other higher-priority and less flexible meetings arise. The user would have to then go into the calendar and find a new available timeslot.